This sentence appeared in my textbook in the section explaining それにしても／それにしては. From what I gathered (correct me if I'm wrong..) それにしても is used when something above the speaker's expectation happens. Conversely, それにしては would refer to something that was below expectation.

So the sentence goes like this:

難易度の高い問題だが、それにしては正解者が多かった。

I'm guessing it means " It is a difficult question, but many people got it right."

The result was beyond the speaker's expectation, so why is それにしては used here?

This is my understanding, which may very well be wrong:XにしてはY is used when something is different from expectations, whether above or below. It just means "given X, unexpected Y is true."XにしてもY means that given X, you would expect some level of Y, but the actual level of Y is beyond expectations. i.e. 冬にしても雪がおおい. So にしても would not work in your example because you would not expect many people to get a difficult question correct. I believe that 難易度が低いにしても、皆が１００点取ってびっくりしました。

Yudan Taiteki on 01 Mar 2008 11:47This is my understanding, which may very well be wrong:X にしてはY is used when something is different from expectations, whether above or below. It just means "given X, unexpected Y is true."XにしてもY means that given X, you would expect some level of Y, but the actual level of Y is beyond expectations

Yudan's interpretation of X にしてはY is correct. にしては deals with expectations. However, his interpretation of にしても is not quite correct, in that the phrase does not necessarily deal with one's expectations. Xにしても means that you have taken X into account for whatever it is worth in coming up with the ensuing comment, but the ensuing event may or may not be what you expected as a direct consequence of X. E.g., 雪が降っているにしても、あいつ来るのが遅いな。 未だ春だとは言えないにしても、雪空が晴れないな。

Also, 冬にしても雪がおおい is awkward. You either would say 冬にしては雪がおおい or 冬だとしても雪がおおい.

bamboo4 wrote:Yudan's interpretation of X にしてはY is correct. にしては deals with expectations. However, his interpretation of にしても is not quite correct, in that the phrase does not necessarily deal with one's expectations. Xにしても means that you have taken X into account for whatever it is worth in coming up with the ensuing comment, but the ensuing event may or may not be what you expected as a direct consequence of X. E.g., 雪が降っているにしても、あいつ来るのが遅いな。 未だ春だとは言えないにしても、雪空が晴れないな。

Both of your examples deal with expectations; the first one indicates that even granting a person would be late due to snow, this person is exceptionally late. The second one indicates that you wouldn't necessarily expect the snow to stop since it's not spring yet, but even so it's snowing a lot (or over a period of days or whatever).

Perhaps a better example (this is from a textbook) is 今度の事件とは関係がなかったにしても、あのグループの人たちが危ないことをしているのは確かだ。 I don't think you can construe that example to involve expectations.

"Even granting that..."(or "Granted, ...") may be a better English equivalent that captures the range of meanings. Even granting that it's snowing a lot, he's really late.Granted, it's not quite spring yet, but it's still been gloomy every day.Even granting that they weren't part of the recent incident, those group members were still doing dangerous things.Even granting that this test was easy, I'm still surprised everyone got 100%.Granted, this was a very difficult question, but even so hardly anyone got it right.Even granting that the girl is popular, she gets a huge number of visitors.

Another possibility is ("X, but even so...")She is his wife, but even so she reached her limit.

This turns out to be more difficult than I expected. (難しい問題にしても、まだわかりません？？？）

If I use Yudan's explanation on Coco's sentence:「暖冬にしては、雪が多い」 In spite of it being a warm winter, there is a lot of snow. (The result is unexpected, given that it's a warm winter)Or, 「厳しい冬にしても、雪が多い」 Granted it is a harsh winter, but even so there is a lot of snow. (The result is even more than what is expected of a harsh winter)